Screen

...The crummy little men peeking in crum- my little motels and the bureaucratized sleuths running down credit checks on their PC's are the reality, and always have been...

...The play is full of not very funny devices about the wrong persons being in the wrong beds and someone's being trapped in a closet and an offstage motorcycle that elicits verbal caresses of the word Yamaha...

...Morrison was a self-styled poet whose lush voice and sexual mystique made The Doors a wildly popular rock band in the late sixties...

...I'm going to try doing a detective novel," I told him...

...GERALD WEALES SCREEN SEX, DRUGS & ROCK "N" ROLL OLIVER STONE'S 'THE DOORS' he Doors is pretty awful---certainly it's dull, and in large part obtuse, even silly...

...Director and writer Oliver Stone previously has demonstrated great narrative strength and visceral power, if little intel- lectual imagination, in Platoon and Wall Street...

...It turns out that they never much liked him when they were presumed to be his friends, they have not seen him for years, and he is so smugly comfortable in his memories of his beloved that her presumed perfections give him the excuse to diagnose them incorrectly and prescribe unlikely happy endings to their insurmountable problems--of which there are plenty...

...Drugs, sexual experi- mentation, and the violent generational antagonisms surrounding the Vietnam war figure centrally in his work...

...It is also why the golden age of the private-eye story, in American literature and American film, is the late forties and fifties, the years in which we were trying to come to terms with our newfound and awesome inter- national power and, at the same time, with our growing dis- ease over the loss of those communal, charitable values that entitled us to wield such power...

...A Yale college dropout and Vietnam veteran, he has strong ideas about and an obvious identification with the period...

...Both playwrights are phenomenally successful in their own countries and not much admired abroad, and their styles are certainly very different...

...What teen-agers, rock entrepreneurs, and college students proclaimed as moral and sexual wisdom had more to do with the social autonomy made possible by affluence, the suburbs, mobility, the pill, and an awkwardly prolonged adolescence than with any advance in the human spirit...

...But you get the point...

...So too with the bores, who are simply boring on the page, but funnily boring in the flesh, and the stairway business is more amusing than one might expect from a visual tiptoe gag that is endlessly repeated...

...Still, it's well-meaning in its own confused way...

...They went on to release a handful of albums char- acterized by cryptic lyrics, dreamy rhythms, and an insistent organ line...

...Stone reputedly conceived of The Doors as the final panel in a triptych about the sixties which includes his Vietnam war movies Born on the Fourth of July and Platoon...

...As we know, that revolution quickly devolved into nihilistic excess...

...You see where I'm tending...

...It is about a group of insuf- ferable people who have been brought together by Diana, who is determined that they should console the even more insufferable Colin on the death of his fiancre...

...I could tell you that any number of people, from W.H...

...Science fiction--the other thriving popular form--has fared better...

...the characters share performance space but go unseen, however ludi- crous their behavior, by the other characters, momentarily at rest, who are presumably on other floors...

...Wells...

...Auden to my colleague and valued friend Thomas Steiner, have written 296: Commonweal eloquently about the detective story as a permanent model for all storytelling: after all, isn't the ur-form of all story the joke, and isn't the whole idea of telting or hearing a joke waiting for the point--for the punchline or for the revelation of the murderer...

...The main device, however, involves the kind of scenic trickery that Ayckbourn has used on other occasions...

...Maybe--and this is to our cred- it-no empire in history has experienced such profound anxiety at the very moment of its ascendancy...

...DOWLING n 1981, I was teaching at Northwestern and had just finished a not-too-bad book on the science fiction of H.G...

...The hunger so evident in the sixties for meaningful connection to the world was real enough, but the remedy chosen was mad- deningly self-defeating...

...Tristram, the young solicitor who is so shy that he is practically tongue-tied, is tedious on the page, but on stage, as played by Spike McClure, he is very funny...

...Brenda Blethyn, on the other hand, gave a hilarious performance as Diana, even during the character's final breakdown at the end of the play, an intensely painful moment that was one laugh after another...

...There is more to Absent Friends...

...But let's talk about television instead...

...This general definition covers such detectives as Holmes in London, Chandler's Philip Marlowe in Los Angeles, or for that matter Batman in Gotham City (remember that Batman, unlike Superman, is one of us--i.e., one of the wounded...

...And those things are, of course, easier to jam about in a lecture than the challenging business of trying to explain why a story works...

...I didn't--though I should have--answer, "No, under yours, you toad...

...I was chatting in the faculty lounge with a / colleague of mine--very distinguished guy, published in all the right journals--who asked me what I was going to write next...

...Morrison's band first flaunted its celebration of primitivism, anarchic sex, and promiscuous drug-taking in 1967 with "Light My Fire...

...The real test occurs on a stage...

...The Catcher in the Rye in 1953...

...I want to convince you that the detective story is one of the best--I'd say, the best--indices of how we, as a culture, imagine ourselves and imagine our ability to make sense of our contemporary, circumambient mess...

...Now the Private Investigator, invented in 1877 by Arthur Conan Doyle, is a figure the modern age demanded: a private citizen defending the ideas of justice and order in a city that has grown too complex and corrupt, seemingly, to maintain them officially...

...What Stone delivers, alas, is a pretty standard Hollywood rendition of wounded and self-destructive celebrity...

...There is not much substance to Taking Steps, but none is intended...

...Never mind that, as American storytellers, any of those fellows make Saul Bellow and John Updike sound like puzzled anthropologists examining an unfa- miliar culture and writing about it in a second language...

...Still, The Doors is essentially a religious narrative...

...And if I'm fight about that, then the evolution of the private-eye story on television over the last twenty years has a lot to tell us about...

...He merged in 1971 at twenty-seven, worn out by alcohol and drugs, thus joining a growing pantheon of rock musicians whose "creativity" was linked to fatal excess and whose purity of pur- pose was preserved by precocious death...

...Even when electronically amplified, it sounds like a very old story...

...Much of the play is funny, in a flesh- crawling way, although Diana's husband is too much of a bully and the sluttish Evelyn, with whom he had it off (sort of) in the back seat of his car, is too involved in her own boredom to be comic--at least as they were played at MTC...

...Benedict Nightingale was in the denial column recently (New York Times, February 10) in an article preceding the opening of two early Ayckbourn plays, Taking Steps (1979), which is still playing at the Circle in the Square, and Absent Friends (1974), which played the usual limited run at Manhattan Theatre Club...

...The crowd of crocks above Kravitz's Kandy Store could have learned a trick or two about laughing angst from Diana and from Brenda Blethyn...

...The detective story, that hardiest and most apparently inexhaustible of popular forms, enjoys at best a demimondaine celebrity among the official guardians of our republic of letters...

...In reacting to the impersonal forces con- trolling them, prophets like Morrison proposed what Douglas called a "revolution of feeling...

...It is for fun or for nothing and, happily, it is often for fun...

...Morrison had a romantic eschatological vision that combined megalomaniacal amoralism CI can do anything," he wrote) with a pantheistic longing to merge with the universe...

...Of course it's a myth...

...BROWN TO FR...

...That is why, I think, Doyle invented Holmes the year before Jack the Ripper defined the modern city as the scene of absolute and unpredictable risk...

...The brutal and flawed avenger, Mike Hammer, and the disoriented, self-loathing victim, Holden Caulfield, are almost congenital twins (I, the Jury in 1947...

...Sort of like George Bush telling us all he likes pork rinds...

...We end up with only the tedium of empty ritual...

...Are you going to publish it under your own name...

...It's all about "ideas," you see, and it lends itself to all sorts of very modernist-looking narrative experiments (gosh--is a computer telling the story...

...In telling this grim tale Stone seems to be aiming for the solemnity and mystery of a High Mass--no less than a re-presentation of Morrison's passion and sacrifice...

...There should be "knights"--an image that pops up with amazing frequency in detective tic- tion--willing to be fools for the truth, bear witness for the fight, even though the fight may be temporarily obscured and marching to a hesitant drum...

...Morrison 294: Commonweal etry looks remarkably the same...

...It's the kind of book an English professor will gladly--and condescendingly--admit to reading "to unwind": makes him seem a regular guy, you know...

...Not even the sentimental endings of Simon's recent autobiographical work can mask the sense of impending disaster that is more obvious in broadly comic works like Last of the Red Hot Lovers and The Prisoner of Second Avenue...

...Or I could tell you that I decided I wanted to be a writer because I fell in love with my grandfather's Mickey Spillanes and Ellery Queens when I was thirteen (sure--the covers helped pique my interest), so that when I published my first novel at the age of forty it was less a "career change" than a homecoming...

...Taking Steps is a farce about sex and real estate in which one woman decides not to leave her boring husband, another decides to run away from her even more boring fianc6 (he puts himself to sleep when he talks), and the boring husband decides to buy a white elephant of a house none of them wants...

...But for real...

...In the preface to the published version of the play, Ayckboum says, "unfortunately, it's possible to gain only an inkling of a play's merit from reading it...

...What they have in common is a very black view of human pos- sibilities and a desire to illustrate it in comfortable, comic sur- roundings...

...A vigilante, perhaps: surely a self-appointed, maybe obsessed, representative of the way things ought to be in the midst of a society that has forgotten the way things ought to be...

...This is clearly true of Taking Steps...

...But he is at a real loss in trying to sort out the troth--with a capital T--from the imbecilities in the life of Jim Morrison, the notorious rock star h la Dionysus...

...Ahh," he ahhed...

...It is cus- tomary to talk about how Ayckbourn's comedies have darkened in the last decade or so, but I cannot recall that the fun and games of the earlier ones grew out of any sanguine sense of human relationships...

...Forget it...

...Also Hamlet and Oedipus...

...Sometimes what we feel most intensely should be most suspect...

...Or that--having just served on the Edgar (Mystery Writers of America) jury for Best First Novel of 1990--I can assure you that the average young mystery writer out there is at least as talented as the average young "mainstream" (whatever the hell that is) novelist...

...But we need, and we want, to believe there are individuals who see the wrongs of the system, and can somehow right--even in a tiny way--those wrongs...

...This time, the single set depicts three rooms, one atop another, the room identified in each case by particular articles of furniture...

...PAUL BAUMANN MEDIA DIMMING OF THE PRIVATE EYE FROM FR...

...ne of the commonplaces of casual criticism is to suggest or to deny that there are strong similarities between Neil Simon and Alan Ayckbourn...

...When was the last time you saw a syllabus for "twen- tieth-century American literature" that included Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler or Ross McDonald or James Crumley or Stuart Kaminsky...